23-year-old Venezuelan kayaker Adrián Simancas experienced what many might consider a moment frozen in time. While paddling through the Strait of Magellan off Chile’s Patagonian coast with his father, Simancas found himself inside the mouth of a humpback whale.
The moment, which lasted mere seconds, felt like an eternity.
“I spent a second realizing I was inside the mouth of something, that maybe it had eaten me, that it could have been an orca or a sea monster,” he recalled in an interview with BBC Mundo. Simancas described the sensation as slimy, with his vision engulfed by shades of dark blue and white.
The incident unfolded in an instant. One moment, he was paddling peacefully, the next, a massive force struck from behind, closing in on him and dragging him underwater. His father, Dall Simancas, who was paddling just ahead, turned around to find his son gone. However, within seconds, Adrián was expelled from the whale’s mouth and surfaced, gasping for air.
The elder Simancas managed to capture the remarkable event on camera, later watching in disbelief at the sheer size of the whale. “I hadn’t seen the moment when the back appears, and the fin is visible,” Adrián admitted. “But later, with the video, I realized it was so enormous that perhaps if I had seen it, it would have scared me even more.”
Though the experience was terrifying, experts explain that the whale never intended to consume the kayaker. According to Brazilian conservationist Roched Jacobson Seba, humpback whales have narrow throats designed to swallow only small fish and shrimp. “They physically cannot swallow large objects like kayaks, tires, or even big fish like tuna,” Seba clarified.
This encounter was likely accidental, occurring as the whale surfaced while feeding. “The whale was likely feeding on a school of fish when it unintentionally scooped up the kayak along with its meal,” Seba explained. He noted that such incidents serve as a reminder for kayakers to be cautious in whale-inhabited waters.
For Adrián, the experience was more than just a narrow escape it was a moment of reflection. “It invited me to reflect on what I could have done better and how I can appreciate life more,” he said.
In the grand scale of time, his brief entrapment within the whale’s mouth was fleeting. Yet, for Adrián Simancas, it was a defining moment one he will carry with him for a lifetime.
